It's hard to predict the future because we humans prefer to think in terms of familiar paradigms. Even the most brilliant of our species are subject to this flaw. Now, Microsoft faces its turn. The owner of the operating system that likely runs your personal computer, the company that achieved monopoly with Windows and ducked the Department of Justice's scythe to keep it, faces a midlife crisis as the world goes gaga over portable consumer devices. This is the story of what's happening to Microsoft in the handheld operating system markets -- and how it parallels the earlier, similar journeys of IBM Corporation and Digital Equipment Corporation. Can Microsoft achieve dominance on mobile devices?

OpenOffice has the best compatibility with Office which the open-source world has to offer, but it's not perfect. Complex documents may or may not work. For a home user or a student like me it's okay, but on a larger scale it's really not okay.

Always been wrong Go-oo fork off openoffice has always been higher in compatibility. These days libreoffice has taken over that location. This is basically someone trolling because they don't really know what is out there.

Apart from that, there's also a problem of intrinsic software qualities. Oo's UI is obscure in places, they cloned office 2000 and it was not the best UI microsoft has ever done to say the least. Impress is okay for light use, but Writer makes some simple things very complicated (ex : OO formulas vs MathType, paragraph numbering...), and let's not even talk about Calc vs Excel.[\q]

Again wrong. OpenOffice UI design predated MS Office. Even predates Windows 3.11 goes back before MS even made there first Office or Works programs. If anyone cloned anyone it was the other way over. Big problem is it should have been revamped in a lot of places in the year 2000 when it was released open source.

Paragraph numbering is more stable in OpenOffice than MS Office. Once set right it stays right.

Major performance issues have been repaired in Calc with libreoffice as well as Excel formula importing. Again this is a legacy code issue. Internal of Calc being single threaded in many places causing major bottle necks.

[q] Finally, there's plug-in compatibility. Office has some very interesting add-ons like XLSTAT, which are obviously not compatible with OpenOffice.

Again it comes down to what you are doing with XLSTAT. There are a lot of cases same result as XLSTAT can be got with alfresco extensions and other solutions. Most of the extensions for Excel are not unique there are other ways of getting the same result.

Windows is yet another issue. There are two problems here : hardware and software.

Since there are no standard interfaces to hardware anymore, modern hardware requires drivers. Drivers are made by the manufacturer and OS-specific, which means that Linux is often doomed to using either crappy proprietary drivers (as they don't matter in terms of market share, the HW manufacturer does not pay attention to what it codes) or second-class community drivers made from reverse engineering, which are often coming late at the party, unstable, or poor in some areas (3D acceleration, power management).

Play the hardware card. Funny Linux has drivers for ATI cards that are not even released yet. No way those drivers could have come from reversing.

This is not uncommon these days. To see specs being released to Linux first. Some of the arm hardware out there only has Linux drivers that is the end of it. Hardware card only applies if you are playing x86 and even then it reducing.

And then, there's software. Where are AutoCAD, Photoshop, After Effect for Linux ? There are sometimes (not always) equivalents, but they don't have the same UI, and often do not offer exactly the same functionality - which results in a productivity loss.

Reverse is also true. Linux has access to some software that is either not provide for windows or fails to run at speed under windows.

This is nothing more than a OS change issue. This is basically a nil issue. After Effects is really not the best tool out there.

Best tool in After Effects class out there is called Lightworks. That is currently being ported to Linux as well as becoming open source. Sorry Lightworks out features After Effects in everyway.

Autocad also has its equal and better replacements for Linux. Photoshop is really the only tricky one you listed without a replacement that can kick it but in every way. Big thing here is how many of your desktop users really would need Photoshop,